Criticise my website

[Planish]

<META content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0" name=GENERATOR> There's yer problem.

What does this mean, then? Does Safari just refuse to read sites that carry a Front Page tag? That sounds like bad news for Safari. I guess I can try taking it out of the code though.

Erm... No.
That line just tells me that the WYSIWYG editor that you used to compose the page was MS FrontPage. Removing it from the source will not change how it displays.

A while ago I had spent a few years being a fairly active volunteer editor for the Open Directory Project - http://dmoz.org.
In the course of that activity I had to view and rate about a scrillion websites, in various areas of the directory, on a variety of subjects. Some sites were very professionally done, and others *cough_my_awesome_kewl_pokemon_site_cough* not so much.

Very often I would come across a page that didn't look right, in more than one browser. It might be text obscured by images, missing scrollbars for text that ran off the window, messed up tables, etc. Even MS Internet Explorer might not display them properly. The overwhelming majority of these afflicted sites were composed using Microsoft FrontPage. It would create sloppy source code, and use formatting tags that were peculiar to MS Internet Explorer. You might not see the faults if you only viewed them with MS IE for Windows because MS IE was overly lax in things like requiring some tags to be "closed". You could be deceived by MS IE, thinking that the source code was okay, while many other browsers (rightfully) required it to be more syntactically correct.

My story (that I'm sticking to) is that it was an evil plot by Micro$oft to make other browsers look bad, by giving people the tools (FrontPage) to create lots of content that is "best viewed by" MS IE only.

The only worse way to create HTML code is to export it from a Word document.

FrontPage does have its uses. It is convenient for me to use it at work to edit shared documents on our LAN, but only because I know exactly what platform and browser my colleagues are using.

[Planish]

The external links on the main page have much more real estate than your own content.

It sounds like this is a bad thing, but I'm not sure why.

People are just more likely to notice the links that navigate away from your site, than the links that navigate around your site. At least thats what I understand from what Planish said.

If it was me I would probably make a separate link's page and put those links there. Or you could maybe have a slight re-arrange of the main page and make it so that your site navigation links are more in your face than the external links.

Yup. That's what I meant.
"Links" pages are usually an afterthought, and are stashed somewhere else besides the introductory page.

[CarlManchester]

Okay, so on the real estate issue, I've changes one of the boxes so as to link to my own content (top third from left : http://www.carlmanchester.net). If I progressively do this with more boxes, does this address that issue? And would it also be enough to address the issue of not having an immediate "about" blurb on the homepage?

And is it fair also to say that if I then look into CSS, this will also solve the Safari problem?

Thanks,
Carl.

[Chrisczech]

You may want to consider making the "about" page your home page so that the purpose of the site is clarified for the visitor from the start.

Then you can link to the philosophy texts, the translations etc, and finally to other lnks.

The css will not specifically solve the safari problem. That is much more a case of properly formed html tags, which will allow all browsers to display your pages correctly.

If you look at the source code you can see the 'style' codes applied to each element; css merely helps organise these separately, so that they are easier to edit. You will find lots of style code applied in a <p> paragraph tag and only a space in the tag!
E.g.

Code: Select all

<P 
style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px" 
align=center>&nbsp;</P>

The w3schools site has good introductions to html, xhtml (similar but stricter) and css.

HTH
Chris

[Planish]

See http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.carlmanchester.net/ for the results of the W3C Markup Validation Service.
The big red banner at the top says "This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Frameset!" - That's probably why Safari sees no frames. Firefox was no doubt written to anticipate common (eg. Frontpage-generated) code errors. It's like a policeman that stops you for going 5 over the speed limit, but always lets you get off with a warning.

Many of the errors it reports are harmless, such as in "Line 17 column 19: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"."
"Leftmargin" is an Internet Explorer-specific <body> attribute, and if the browser does not recognise it, it just jams the text hard up against the left side of the window. I use on some of my pages, but I also include the Netscape-specific version of it, "marginwidth", like so:

Code: Select all

<body  bgcolor="#F2F2F2" leftmargin="35" marginwidth="35">

The validator reports both as errors - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.northernelectric.ca/ .
If any browser does not recognise either one of them, it's no big deal.

At any rate, I've added CarlManchester.net to my Firefox bookmarks. The list of philosphy text/audio links seems like a handy thing to have.